As Lance packed his implements back into his bag, the young man sat up and looked around. Lance had left the room almost completely dark, the only illumination from distant street lights coming through the broken window with the evening chill. The window was high enough to be seen from the street, and given the magic he was already using, he didn't want to waste his attention diverting curious eyes.
He waited a moment for the young man to remember where he was before he spoke. “You’re up, that’s good. You can help me clean up this mess.” He stood and moved to the door, flicking a switch in the hall to turn on a light there. “My name is Lance.”
The young man did not reply to his overture. Lance saw the tension in his face and laughed. “I guess you did learn something in the short time you were here. But being tight-lipped isn’t going to help you with us.” Lance rattled off Alex’s name, birthday, home address, and mobile number. He was starting to relay Alex's grades at university when the young man stopped him.
“How the fuck do you know all of that about me?” Alex's voice rose until he was almost shouting, but squeaked at the end.
Lance held up hand placatingly. “It’s our job to know. We stop trouble when it starts. So we have to know who's going to start it. ”
“What are you, the magic police or something?”
“No, we’re a private organization. There is no police to handle things like this. There's no jail that can hold a mage either. But as dangerous as magic can be, most of it isn't flashy. Making subtle changes works better when no one even realizes something was changed. So magic users value a level of secrecy. Guys like these upset that.”
He could almost see the gears turning in the boy's head. “So someone pays you to keep magic use quiet,” Alex said.
“Close enough. It works itself out most of the time. As you get some skill, one circle or another will usually invite you to be a member. We only get involved when there’s a real danger, often from someone no one would take in, or as in this case, from a whole circle itself.”
“So if nobody's paying you...”
“No. We're not mercenaries. If there's a real threat, we'll show up and handle it.” Lance stood up. “We can keep talking as we work. I want you to help me get rid of the bodies.”
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Alex’s mouth hung open a bit. “Bodies?”
Lance scratched his beard and gestured for the boy to follow. “You probably couldn’t hear it up here. We used one of my Stealth spells. Concealment is one of the specialties of my magic.”
As they descended the stairs, Lance stepped over two that were badly cracked, as if something extremely heavy had fallen on them. Down the hall, next to the front door, another Lance was bent over two lumps of cloth.
“My partner made a bit of a mess,” Lance spoke over his shoulder.
They walked into the parlor that Alex had only glanced in earlier. A haze of acrid smoke hung in the air, that Lance recognized as a mixture of gunsmoke and burnt fabric. There was another Lance here, kneeling and peering under the furniture.
Lance paused to see at what his doppelganger was doing, and nodded as the other came up with a small object that caught the light. He was gathering the bullet casings. A glance back at Alex revealed the kid hesitating in the door, wide-eyed at the scene of carnage. Almost half a dozen bodies lay sprawled in various positions. Blood was spattered on the furniture, a bit on the far wall. A large scorch mark was still smoking from the carpet.
Lance stepped aside, so that Alex could see that the man picking up brass casings looked identical to himself. Alex looked from one to the other, and then stepped back out of the room, looking down the hall at the third man. “Triplets…?” Alex murmured to himself, returning to the room.
“No,” both Lances in the room answered simultaneously. The kneeling man chuckled and went back to what he was doing. “We’re not brothers, relatives, or clones. We’re all the same person,” Lance explained. He laughed at the incredulous look on Alex’s face. I guess it is pretty impressive, he thought, when people see it for the first time. “They’re all me, from different lines of probability.”
“And all of these… people. You killed them all?”
“Just the two in the hall. I don’t like being on the front lines.”
“Just two? And your partner killed the rest?” Alex looked horrified.
“You do realize that they tried to kill you first, right? We wouldn’t have moved on them without confirming they were dangerous.”
“They… I’m not sure what happened up there.” Alex shivered, his arms clutching himself.
“These people were warlocks, Alex,” Lance said. “Anyone can use magic for their own benefit. To get an edge in business, to make themselves rich, even to manipulate what others think… we don’t get involved with any of that. It’s just people using skills they have, the same as a pro basketball player uses his athletic ability. What gets us to come knock on your door is when you use magic to hurt people, to terrorize, to rape or murder, or,” he swept his hand at the corpses on the floor, “to steal other people’s lives.”
Lance's phone beeped, and he turned away from Alex to answer it. It was a message in the chat that contained all of his other selves. “Lost them in nw Alexandria. Stopped to help injured bystanders.” Shit. Not that I didn't expect it. He moved from the chat to a call. It connected automatically through the Company's app. “Did you find her?” he asked.